I write and speak about technology's impact on business and life in books, for Forbes and occasionally for business. I'm author of five books including Age of Context and Naked Conversations and am currently researching a book with the working title of The We Economy: How Technology Gives Everyone a Better Shot. Pitch me by email: ShelIsrael1@gmail.com.

Taking Google Glass In Context

By now, you’ve heard about Google: Project Glass. This video shows what they will do when they become available next year and will be put into the hands of third-party developers some of whom may use the new wearable computer technology to journey where no one has gone.

Some people love them. My friend Robert Scoble is ecstatic that he will get the 107th developer’s set when they are issued. He sounds like a kid who has been promised a pony for Christmas. Conversely, my wife just hates the idea. She doesn’t want to walk into a room where everyone is wearing odd glasses that distract them from actual human connections.

I’m somewhere in between. I think that there are very complex unanticipated consequences coming down the line. There are obvious ones such as privacy, but there are also strange ones coming when the technology we use starts becoming our intimate advisor, when machines have personalities and start reminding us of R2D2 and the robots we have known in fiction.

All of this is a straight line from Google Glasses. The goggles are part of a category called wearable computers, started by Steve Mann decades ago and nurtured at the MIT Media Lab where they have been developing wearable devices with medical, military and poker-playing applications. There’s even a “Social Petworking” device worn on a dog collar that tells the owner if his dog likes or doesn’t like the approaching neighbor’s dog.

In combat, the military has already begun using drones to great controversy. In the future those drones will be attached to big data so they can tell if the person in the house is a terrorist or innocent neighbor and the drone will actually decide on the action to take. In medicine, there is research on tiny worm-shaped robots that will perform surgery someday at the DNA level, without ever having to open the human body.

In short, they will be a multimedia, networked computer that serve as also as a Siri-type personal assistant that you wear in the guise of glasses.

But they are only the beginning of a great deal that is happening. Some of it has been under development for decades and the Google Glasses themselves are probably the flagship of the next generation of personal technology, on that is certain to change your work and your life as much as each of the last several have if not more.

I have to admit, the Google Glasses seem a bit too odd to me and my wife Paula cringes at the thought of walking into a room where people are tweeting and checking out the news through an odd-looking personal goggles.

But geeks can’t wait to get their eyes behind a pair.

Google Glasses are likely to be the first such popular wearable computers, a concept being worked on at MIT Media Labs for years. They certainly will not be alone for long. AppleApple has filed a patent for a wearable computer headset and as sure as the night follows the day, FacebookFacebook, Amazon and MicrosoftMicrosoft will soon follow.

They may look geeky at first. But so did the first airplanes and mainframes. There may be some early disturbing disasters when wearable computers designed to be extremely personal assistants make mistakes, just like when the first satellite rockets fired from Cape Canaveral failed to get more than a few feet off the ground.

But they will get better. Technology always gets better. Glasses will end up looking far less geeky over time. There will be designer versions at some point with fashionable celebrities modeling them. Then, one day, you won’t be able to discern the wearable computers from the old-fashioned vision enhancing accessories so many of us wear today.

Wearable computers are a subset of a larger category–Contextual Computing. The name may be boring, but the concept is very large and it rests at the point where the SciFi that entertained us yesterday become the essential tools our lives.

Simply put, computers until now have lacked common sense. They can calculate and crunch, they can aggregate the biggest of data masses, but they cannot tell you that your shirt clashes with your jacket, or that today you may want to see sports news before world news because the team you root for is in the playoffs.

Until very recently, intuition has been the purview of humans. Now computers are starting to understand context, and that portends to change a great deal. The contextual computer starts knowing you better than your best friends know you. It will advise and coach you on everything from the best route to work to whether the background of the person you are looking at indicates this is a person to embrace or avoid.

Contextual Computing goes beyond wearables. New buildings are switching to digital glass, which controls temperature and tint as weather changes outside. It also sense when people enter a room and adjust lighting and temp.

Not only are we about to start wearing computers, some of us are beginning to merge with them. There has been a successful implant behind a blind man’s eye, restoring his vision with a device not unlike the one depicted in the sci-fi movie Eyeborgs. Jesse Sullivan, a Tennessee lineman lost both his arms at the shoulder and has had a new generation of prosthetic devices installed that somehow allow his chest nerves to braid with the devices so that his brain can tell his artificial limbs to move the same way your and mine do. A new prosthetic skin lets him enjoy the sensations of touch.

In short, there’s a whole lot coming and it will arrive soon. You may tingle like Scoble or worry like my wife, but like it or not the stuff is coming and it is going to change how you and I live and work. It will do far more in impact the duration and quality of our children’s lives.

At the key to it all is a fundamental change in the nature of computers and thus the relationship that we have with them. Until very recently, computers have simply lacked common sense. They have been logical but not intuitive. The can crunch, aggregate and calculate, but they cannot really sense what you would like or who you want to know.

The social network companies have of course started trying to anticipate your preferences stepping into the very controversial issues of personal privacy. A few years back, they were laughably awful at it. When my first book came out, and I wrote “Naked Conversations,” in the subject line, I almost always say an ad for Victoria’s Secret. But lately, they are getting better at understanding the context in which we speak, the results are improving and the technology is starting to feel humanly intuitive.

They are starting to understand the context in which we are using them and asking for information and as we start to accept that it changes how we interact with technology in a way that brings us back to Sci-Fi.

Have you seen the Apple Siri ads with John Malkovich? Malkovich sits alone by the fireplace chatting amiably with a piece of mobile software. There is a fondness between them. Siri shares a joke. She is clearly female. There is some sort of trusted friendship between the actor and his talking handset.

The ad is not quite reality. Siri today, according to a recent study said she gets it right only 62% of the time. But she is young and she will improve. She already has other competitors and that will accelerate the rate of improvement.

Where is it all going? I have absolutely no idea. Are their dangerous unintended consequences looming? Of course there are. Have we hit the point when Dr.Frankstein should not be allowed to create the next sentient monster? Not a chance.

The history of the human animal, in my view, is the story of how are technologies just keep improving, even while people say pretty much the same. Like it or not, we are entering an age of contextual computing and once again technologies are about to dramatically alter how we work, live and communicate.

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Context is everything. Autistic people can’t read faces and body language. With Google software and 16,000 VMs reading faces at 60Hz even the slightest twitch will tell a liar. Poker will be no fun, except offline.

Google’s video face identification is tailored to fast recognition of friend or foe. Try Google glasses at your next convention. Who’s that trying to listen in at the bar.

Of course the excitement won’t go out of internet dating when a blind date means leaving your Google Glasses at home.